This picture was a false start. I started laying lines on the paper to outline this Church I was sketching in Billings, and it quickly became clear to me that I messed it up. I normally start with a rough outline in pencil, so that I can make adjustments if something is out of proportion or incorrectly constructed. But on this day I decided to forgo the pencil and go right to the pen. I guess I was feeling confident in my ability to get it right the first time. With a pen, there is no erasing.
A few minutes into it I realized that the detail of the roof line connection to the tower was incorrectly drawn. I abandoned this page and started over on the next pages, using pencil this time for my rough outline. So much for confidence.
This was the first real blunder in this sketchbook. Sure, there are sketches in there that I think are not so terrific, but everything else could be tinkered with to at least make them look acceptable. This stuck out like a sore thumb.
My initial reaction was to cut out or cover over the page so that it did not detract from the rest of the art in this book. But when I got home I forgot about it. Every time I rifled through the book I’d see this failed page and inwardly grimace. When someone would look through the book, on the street or at an Art Association meeting, I’d try to move them quickly past it, “oh, don’t look at that, it’s just a mistake.” But I never removed or covered the page.
The other day I was flipping through the book and saw the page and felt something different. For some reason, I was all of a sudden okay with it. In fact it has come to be one of my favorite pages in this book. Not because of the quality of the sketch; it is still a bad sketch. But because, together with the rest of my art, it tells a more real story about who I am. Astoundingly imperfect.
These days, late in life, I sometimes dwell on what I don’t know, what I failed to learn, or what I can’t do. I look at the accomplishments or qualities of other people with envy, not even considering the long road they must have traveled to get where they are. And the mistakes and false starts they’ve undoubtably endured along the way. I find myself now with a desire to grow, to try new things; and one of the byproducts of trying new things is failure, like this little sketch. I still at times find it hard to start something that I may struggle with, or that might have a high probability of initial failure.
I guess if you are designing airplanes or artificial hearts, failure is not such a good thing. But for the normal things that are not “life-critical” that every person does, the consequences of failure are really pretty small, and mostly social; the potential embarrassment of exposing your failings to the world. But to be human is to fail, so hiding one's failings, projecting only your best self, is sort of deceitful. It is only part of the whole story.
Maybe that’s where I have finally arrived in my life, a place where I am not so afraid to try new things for fear of failing. If you look hard enough, there is always some success in every failure. Life can be messy, and like this sketch, things don’t always turn out as I plan. When I hide my failures, I find I cannot hide them from myself. They still find a place in my own mind to sit and bother me, and I tend to revisit them over and over again. And I tend to beat myself up over them. This bad sketch sort of woke me up, so there is some good in it too. It is as much “me” as the best picture I ever painted, so I need to learn to embrace it rather than try to hide it. To not fail now and then, at least in my case, means I probably haven’t tried. And that, for me, would be the biggest failure of all.
